Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

Not long after the alleged murder of his first wife, Mr. Sabbath made his way to the remote mountain village where he was supported until his death by a second wife, who dreamed for years of cutting off his cock and then taking sanctuary in her abused-women’s group. During his three decades in hiding, aside from virtually making a prostitute of Mrs. Drenka Balich, a Croatian American neighbor, he seems to have worked on little else but a five-minute puppet adaptation of the hopelessly insane Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. In his fifties he developed erosive osteoarthritis in both hands, involving the distal interphalangeal joints and the proximal interphalangeal joints, with relative sparing of the metacarpophalangeal joints. The result was radical instability and function loss from persistent pain and stiffness, and progressive deformity. Owing to his prolonged consideration of the advantages of arthrodesis against the advantages of implant arthroplasty, his wife became an expert in Chardonnay. The osteoarthritis provided a wonderful pretext for being even more bitter about everything and devoting his entire day to thinking up ways to degrade Mrs. Balich.

  He is survived by the ghost of his mother, Yetta, of Beth Something-or-other Cemetery, Neptune, New Jersey, who haunted him unceasingly during the last year of his life. His brother, Lieutenant Morton Sabbath, was shot down over the Philippines during the Second World War. Yetta Sabbath never got over it. It is from his mother that Mr. Sabbath inherited his own ability never to get over anything.

  Also surviving is his wife, Roseanna, of Madamaska Falls, with whom he was shacked up on the night that Miss Kantarakis disappeared or was murdered by him and her body disposed of. Mr. Sabbath is believed by Countess du Plissitas to have coerced Mrs. Sabbath, the former Roseanna Cavanaugh, into being an accomplice to the crime, thus initiating her plunge into alcoholism.

  Mr. Sabbath did nothing for Israel.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  a blur whizzing blur why now most unpleasant invention nobody think ticker tape like this I don’t head coming down here stupid find what I lost idiocy Greek Village gyro sandwich souvlaki sandwich baklava you know Nikki gypsy clothes spangles beads angelically on Victorian boots never a fuck without a rape tossed in no no not there but only way she came was there god forgive those dont fuck in the ass hey gyro you know Nikki souvlaki you know Nikki St. Marks hotel $25.60 and up room rent you know Nikki tattooed tubby you know Nikki garbage still from when we left leather shops tie wrists ankles blindfold proceed want to know a secret I want to know only secrets when you use me like a boy Im your boy you are my girl my boy your puppet hand puppet make me a hand puppet Ethnic Jewelry more leather old people Im one Religious Sex Clothing Shop incense Nikki always Nikki burning gift shops T-shirts incense never out of incense fire escapes still need paint long hairs last outpost movers movers movers red-faced brick broad women Polish-American home cooking and what will I say other than why so why bother theres less chance of her being here than my being her cant stand this there is god can those be ours in the window Nikki stained them hung them disappeared I left 120 bucks of Salvation Army shit the wooden blinds she loved there they are the red tapes faded slats missing thirty years later Nikkis blinds

  “Smoke? Wanna smoke?”

  “Not today, honey.”

  “Man, I’m starvin’. I got great smokes. The real McCoy. I ain’t had no breakfast, ain’t had no lunch. Been out here two hours. Ain’t sold shit.”

  “Patience, patience. ‘Nothing illegal is achieved without patience.’ Benjamin Franklin.”

  “Ain’t had fuck to eat, man.”

  “How much?”

  “Five.”

  “Two.”

  “Shit. This is the real McCoy.”

  “But as you are the one starving, the leverage is mine.”

  “Fuck you, old man, old Jew man.”

  “Tut tut. That’s beneath you. ‘Neither a philo- nor an anti-Semite be; / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.’”

  “Someday ain’t gonna be out here beggin’ and sellin’ shit. Gonna be Jews out here beggin’. Wait’ll all the beggars is Jews. You gonna like that.”

  “All the Jews will be begging when there is a black Mount Rushmore, my dear, and not a day sooner—when there is a black Mount Rushmore with Michael Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Bo Jackson, and Ray Charles carved upon its face.”

  “Two for five. I’m starvin’, man.”

  “The price is right—a deal. But you must learn to think more kindly of Jews. You people were here long before we were. We did not have your advantages.”

  Nina Cordelia Desdemona Estroff Pharmacy still here my god Freie Bibliothek u. Lesehalle Deutsches Dispensary all basements Indian boutiques Indian restaurants Tibetan trinkets Japanese restaurants Ray’s Pizza Kiev 24 hours 7 days a week introduction to Hinduism always she was reading dharma artha kama and moksha release from rebirth supreme goal death certainly a worthy subject maybe the greatest certainly a solution for low self-esteem The Racing Form the Warsaw papers the bums the bums the Bowery bums still in the stairwells head in hands piss gushing out from their pockets

  “I’m on a real guilt trip, man.”

  “Say that again, please?”

  “Guilt trip. I need somethin’ to eat. I ain’t had breakfast or lunch yet.”

  “Wouldn’t worry. Nobody has.”

  “I’m innocent, man. I was framed. Somebody help me.”

  “I’ll take your case, son. I believe in your innocence no less than my own.”

  “Thanks, man. You a lawyer?”

  “No, a Hindu. And you?”

  “I’m Jewish. But I studied Buddhism.”

  “Yes, overachiever is written all over your jeans.”

  “What’s it all like to a wise old Hindu?”

  “Oh, not for everyone, but I happen to love hardship. Live on plant foods from the forest. Seek constantly to achieve purity and self-control. Practice restraint of the senses. Perform austerities.”

  “I gotta eat somethin’, man.”

  “Animal food is to be avoided.”

  “Shit, I don’t eat animal food.”

  “Avoid actresses.”

  “How about shiksas?”

  “For a Jew who studies Buddhism the shiksa is not forbidden to eat. Ben Franklin: ‘God forgive those who don’t fuck in the ass.’”

  “You’re nuts, baby. You’re a great Hindu man.”

  “I have passed through life in the world and performed my duties to society. Now I am reinitiated into the celibate state and become like a child. I concentrate on internal sacrifices to the sacred fires in my own self.”

  “Far out.”

  “I am seeking final release from rebirth.”

  lamppost sex sale naked girl silhouette phone number whats that say I speak Hindi Urdu and Bangla well that leaves me out shiksa Mount Rushmore Ava Gardner Sonja Henie Ann-Margret Yvonne de Carlo strike Ann-Margret Grace Kelly she is the Abraham Lincoln of shiksas

  So Sabbath passeth the time, pretending to think without punctuation, the way J. Joyce pretended people thought, pretending to be both more and less unfixed than he felt, pretending that he did and did not expect to find Nikki down in a basement with a dot on her head selling saris or in her gypsy clothes roaming these streets of theirs in search of him. So passeth Sabbath, seeing all the antipathies in collision, the villainous and the innocent, the genuine and the fraudulent, the loathsome and the laughable, a caricature of himself and entirely himself, embracing the truth and blind to the truth, self-haunted while barely what you would call a self, ex-son, ex-brother, ex-husband, ex–puppet artist without any idea what he now was or what he was seeking, whether it was to slide headlong into the stairwells with the substrata of bums or to succumb like a man to the-desire-not-to-be-alive-any-longer or to affront and affront and affront till there was no one on earth unaffronted.

  At least he hadn’t been witless enough to go find on Avenue C where he personally had handed tomatoes to all the first-nighters. It’d be another grim hole in the grou
nd with Indian cuisine. Nor did he cut across Tompkins Park to where his workshop once had been, where they’d fucked so hard and so long that the couch would slide on its casters halfway to the door by the time he’d had to dress and race back to beat Nikki home from the theater. That bewitching bondage now seemed like the fantasy of a twelve-year-old boy. Yet it had happened, to him and to Roseanna Cavanaugh, fresh from Bennington College. When Nikki disappeared, aside from the grief and the tears and the torments of confusion, he was also as delighted as a young man could be. A trapdoor had opened and Nikki was gone. A dream, a sinister dream common to all. Let her disappear. Let him disappear. Only for Sabbath the dream came true.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Dragging him down, spewing him forth, knocking him flat, beating him like the batter in his mother’s Mixmaster. Then, for the finale, a breech delivery onto the shore, leaving him abraded and stinging from where he had been dragged across the pebbled shingle by the churning of the wave he’d mistimed. When he got up he didn’t know where he was—he could be in Belmar. But out to the depths he savagely swam, back to where Morty had a gleaming arm stuck straight up and was shouting over the sound of the sea, “Hercules! Come on!” Morty caught every wave right; zinc-striped nose plowing the way, he’d ride a wave, when the tide was full, from way beyond the last rope to damn near up to the boards. They used to laugh at the Weequahic guys down from Newark. Those guys can’t ride waves, they’d say. Those Newark Jewish kids were all escaping polio. If they were home they’d beg to go swimming at the amusement park pool up there in Irvington and as soon as they paid and got their ticket they immediately got polio. So their parents took them down the shore. If you were a Jew from Jersey City you went to Belmar, if you were a Jew from Newark you went to Bradley. We used to play blackjack with them under the boards. I was introduced to blackjack by those Weequahic guys, then developed my skills further at sea. Those blackjack games were legendary in our little backwater. Down for double! Up the shoot! Bai-ja! And the Jewish Weequahic broads at the Brinley Avenue beach in their two-piece suits, their Weequahic bellies bare. Loved it when they came in for the summer. Up till then all you did was listen to the radio and do your homework. A cloistered, quiet time. And suddenly everything was happening, the streets in Asbury were jammed with people, the boards in Bradley were jammed at night—from the moment the Memorial Day weekend began, our small-town life was over. Waitresses all over Asbury, college girls from all over the country lining up there to get a job. Asbury was the hub, next came Ocean Grove, the Methodist shtetl where you couldn’t drive on Sundays, and then Bradley, and down on the beach Jewish girls from every part of Jersey. Eddie Schneer, the parking-lot thief Morty and I worked for, used to warn us, “Don’t mess with Jewish girls. Save it for the shiksas. Never get nasty with Jewish girls.” And the Jewish city guys from Weequahic who we said couldn’t ride the waves, we used to have wave-riding contests with them, bet them and ride waves for money. Morty always won. Our great summertimes before he joined the Air Corps.

  And when the tide was out and the ailing and the arthritic old drifted down to dunk themselves at the water’s rippling edge, where the sunburned kids with their leaky toy buckets were shoveling for sand crabs, Morty, his pals, and “Little Sabbath” carved a large rectangular court up on the beach, drew a line dividing it, and, three or four to a side, clad in their sopping suits, they played Buzz, a deceptively ferocious beach game devised by the daredevil shore kids. When you’re “it” you have to go over and touch someone on the other side and get back before they pull your arms out of the sockets. If they catch you on the line, your team pulls you one way and the other team pulls you the other way. Much like the rack. “And what happens,” Drenka asked him, “if they do catch you?” “They pull you down. If they catch you, they pull you down, they tackle you, and they sodomize you. Nobody gets hurt.” Drenka laughed! How he could make Drenka laugh when she asked him to tell her about being an American boy at the shore. Buzz. Sand scratching your eyes, stuffing your ears, burning your belly, packing the crotch of your suit, sand between your buttocks, up your nose, a clump of sand, stained with blood, spat from between your lips, and then, together— “Geronimo!”—everyone out again to where the surf was calm now and you could sun yourself on your back, swaying sleepily, laughing at nothing, singing “opera” at the top of your lungs—“Toreador / Don’t spit on the floor / Use the cuspidor / That’s what it’s for!”—and then, spurred by a sudden heroic impulse, spinning about onto your belly for the dive to the ocean floor. Sixteen, eighteen, twenty feet down. Where’s the bottom? Then the lung-bursting battle up to the oxygen with a fistful of sand to show Morty.

  On Morty’s days off from being a lifeguard at the West End Casino, Mickey didn’t leave his side, either on land or sea. What a pounding he could take! And how great that felt when he was a happy-go-lucky kid before the war letting himself go riding the waves.

  Not so now. He clutched the edge of a street vendor’s stand, waiting for the coffee to save him. Thought went on independently of him, scenes summoning themselves up while he seemed to wobble perilously on a slight rise between where he was and where he wasn’t. He was trapped in a process of self-division that was not at all merciful. A pale, pale analog to what must have happened to Morty when his plane was torn apart by flak: living your life backward while spinning out of control. He had the definite impression that they were rehearsing The Cherry Orchard even as he carefully took the coffee cup in one disfigured hand and paid with the other. There was Nikki. This mark she had left on his mind could open out like the mouth of a volcano, and it was already thirty years now. There is Nikki, listening the way she listened when she was given even the minutest note—the look of voluptuous attention, the dark, full eyes without panic, tranquil as only they were when she was having to be someone other than herself, murmuring his words inwardly, brushing her hair off her ears so nothing was between his words and herself, breathing little sighs of defeat to acknowledge just how right he was, his state of mind her state of mind, his sense of things her sense of things, Nikki his instrument, his implement, the self-immolating register of his ready-made world. And rat-a-tat-tat Sabbath, the insuperable creator of her hiding place, born to deliver her from all losses and from all the fears they’d bred, missing not so much as the movement of an eye, punctilious to the point of madness, dangerously prodding the air with a finger so that nobody dared even to blink while he laid it out, every detail, in that overbearing way of his—how frightening he looked to her, a little bull with a big mind, a little keg filled to the spout with the intoxicating brandy of himself, his eyes insisting like that, warning, reminding, scolding, mimicking; it was all to Nikki like a ferocious caress, and she felt in her, overriding everything timorous, this stony obligation to be great. “O my childhood. That’s a question. Don’t lose that soft, questioning tone. Fill the speech with sweetness. To Trofimov: You were only a boy then, et cetera. Some sweet charm has gone there too. More playful, broken—charm him! Your entrance: vivacious, excited, generous—Parisian! The dance. I can’t sit still, et cetera. Be sure to get rid of the cup long before this. Get up. The Parisian dance with Lopakhin takes you downstage, downstage. Compliment Lopakhin on this unexpected excellence in Parisian dancing. You, Varya. Wagging a finger at her. It’s mock chastisement. Then teasing, quick, kissing both her cheeks, You’re just the same as ever. The line I don’t quite follow you—much dizzier. Laugh audibly after mentioned in the encyclopedia. Don’t lose the laughing and the noises—make all the delicious noises you want; they’re wonderful, they’re Ranyevskaya! Much more teasingly provocative with Lopakhin when he goes on and on about the sale of the orchard—that’s where you get your bigness. For you this business talk is just a marvelous occasion to bewitch a new man. Bewitch him! He’s as much as invited you to by saying he loves you the very moment he lays eyes on you. Where are those teasing sounds? The seductive moan. The musical Hmmmmm. Chekhov: ‘The important thing is to find the right smile.’ Tender,
Nikki, innocent, lingering, false, real, lazy, vain, habitual, charming—find the smile, Nikki, or you’ll completely fuck up. Her vanity: powder your face, dab a little scent, straighten up your back to make yourself look beautiful. You are vain and you are aging. Imagine that: a corrupt and weary woman and yet as vulnerable and innocent as Nikki. They’re from Paris. Let us see how lightly you take that—must see that smile. Three steps—only three—up from the torn telegram before you turn back and break down. Then let’s see the breakdown as you retreat to the table. If only this weight could be lifted from my heart. Look at the floor. Musingly, gently, If only I could forget my past. Keep looking down, reflectively, through his line—then look up and you see your mother. IT IS MOTHER. Introduces the past, which magically then appears as Petya. She sees mother in a tree—but can’t recognize Petya. Why does she give Petya the money? This is not convincing as you are doing it. Does he flirt with her? Charm her? Is he a great friend of old? Something has to have been there before to make it credible now. Yasha. Who is Yasha? What is Yasha? He is living proof of her bad judgment. There’s no one there. This whole speech, from beginning to end, is as to a child. Including It looks like a woman. Lopakhin’s past is to be beaten with a stick—your childhood Eden was his childhood hell. Consequently he does not make a sentimental tsimmes out of purity and innocence. Unshrinkingly, Nikki, without shrinking, you cry, Look! It’s mother walking in the orchard! But the last thing Lopakhin would want to see is his drunken father resurrected. Think of the play as her dream, as Lyuba’s Paris dream. She is exiled in Paris, miserable with her lover, and she dreams. I dreamed that I returned home and everything was as it used to be. Mother was alive, she was there—appeared right outside the nursery window in the form of a cherry tree. I was a child again, a child of my own called Anya. And I was being courted by an idealistic student who was going to change the world. And yet at the same time I was myself, a woman with all my history, and the serf’s son, Lopakhin, himself grown now too, kept warning me that if I didn’t chop down the cherry orchard the estate was going to be sold. Of course I couldn’t chop down the cherry orchard, so I gave a party instead. But in the middle of the dancing, Lopakhin burst in, and though we tried to beat him back with a stick, he announced that the estate had indeed been sold, and to him, to the serf’s son! He drove us all out of the house and began to chop down the orchard. And then I awoke . . . Nikki, what are your first words? Tell me. The nursery. Yes! It’s to the nursery that she’s returned. At the one pole the nursery; at the other, Paris—the one a place impossible to retrieve, the other impossible to manage. She fled Russia to elude the consequences of her disastrous marriage; she flees Paris to leave behind the disastrous affair. A woman in flight from disorder. In flight from disorder, Nikoleta. Yet she carries the disorder within her—she is the disorder!”